I love your maps Hunter. Not to complicated, not too simple, great gameplay, nice ranges in height, good for Kbots & Vehicles, pretty, nice designs, natural, nice unmessey effective textures and overall yumminess.
Changes:
-Higher water (durr)
-Tidals down from 30 to a still quite powerful 22
-Map hardness decreased about 85%
-Start positions relocated to NE and SW corners (click minimap in game lobby)
This map is very soft now, and big explosions make huge lakes. One nuke makes a massive inlet for your ships. Three core nukes (or two and a commbomb) and your black hydra is ready to set sail in to the enemy's economy lake.
the WICed texture has 14 layers. i decided to do normal maps and texture maps separately, so there are 11 layers of texture, and 3 layers of normal maps.
i fine-tuned the slope tolerances on the normal maps. if you check ingame closely, you'll see that the first pebbley normalmap appears when vehicles' movement speed is slowed. the second is bumpier, and is applied for kbot-only slopes. the final is the extremely jagged cliff edges and it starts getting applied where kbots cannot walk.
its really a pain in the ass to set these, since it changes for every map depending on your max and min heights. heres how i did it...i used one of the center cliffs and took screenies ingame of the f4 maps to determine where slope tolerances were. in WICed, using the mask editor, i zoomed in on teh same area and adjusted the slope minimum until the same pattern appeared.
here were the settings for this map which will only work for the height range of -16 to 860:
vehicleslow: min 7 degrees, sharpness 89%
kbotonly: min 15 degrees, sharpness 85%
cliff: min 46 degrees, sharpness 85%
apply these in the hierarchy such that they overlap each other
as for the water, i tried lowering the WaterSurfaceAlpha tag but it didn't have the result i wanted...there should be something that decreases the amount of side reflectivity but keeps the same amount when viewed from overhead.